Adobe’s new Buzzword: online word processing and collaboration

Adobe has announced that they are acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, a company that …

Mention Adobe, and the first thing that comes to mind is probably Photoshop, or maybe Acrobat. However, the San Jose-based software company has been extending its reach in recent years, and thanks to recent mergers and acquisitions, it now stands as one of the largest remaining supplier of desktop applications. To this end, Adobe has just announced that it is acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, an 11-person startup "Web 2.0" company that has created a web-based word processor called Buzzword. Terms of the agreement were not disclosed.

Buzzword is a natural fit for Adobe, as it uses the Adobe Integrated Runtime (or AIR for short) to do its work. This set of development frameworks, formerly code-named Apollo) allows developers to use HTML, JavaScript, and Flash to create rich online applications. Buzzword uses Flash almost exclusively—requiring the user to have the latest version installed—and because of this, it looks and feels more like a traditional desktop application. Buzzword claims to be the most what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) of all the online word processors available, offering fine control over placement of elements such as graphics and tables. While like most new applications it is very light on features, it does boast the ability to have multiple users post comments when collaborating on a single document.

Buzzword. Image courtesy Virtual Ubiquity.

The collaboration features are definitely what piqued Adobe's interest. According to a company spokesperson, the reason that the graphics giant acquired Virtual Ubiquity was because the company "believes in the value of high-quality document authoring and the power of working together more efficiently." The plan is to take the online word processor and slowly integrate it into the rest of Adobe's product suite, first by adding support for PDF output—Buzzword currently imports and exports Rich Text Format (.RTF) files, Microsoft Word (.DOC) files, and Word 2003 XML files—and then add support for future releases of Acrobat Connect, Create Adobe PDF Online, and Adobe Document Center. The program is also likely to be integrated with Adobe Share, an online storage locker that offers a gigabyte of storage, Flash preview of saved documents, and PDF output.

Whether or not Buzzword will be attractive enough to get Office users to switch over in great numbers is questionable: the program may end up joining so many other "lite" word processors of the past in the digital dustbin. However, the attractiveness of online document collaboration has not escaped Microsoft, who recently announced its Office Live Workspace as a way of offering online collaboration while still requiring users to hang on to Microsoft Office. By acquiring Virtual Ubiquity, Adobe gets to bolster its own PDF-centered document workflow, as well as promoting its own development frameworks for the next-generation of web-based applications.